Specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia: The same or different?
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1
Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
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2
Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Germany
The present study aims to contribute to the current understanding of how two developmental language disorders – specific language impairment (SLI) and developmental dyslexia (DD) – differ with respect to language comprehension mechanisms. The term SLI is applied to children whose language comprehension and/ or production abilities are substantially below their chronological age while the term DD refers to children who experience severe difficulties in learning to read and/ or write/ or spelling. Both disorders affect some aspects of language selectively despite the fact that the children have a normal nonverbal intelligence and have no additional deficits (e.g., neurological or physiological impairments) that could impact on the use of spoken language. Using event-related-potentials (ERPs), sixteen children with SLI (age: M=9;7, SD=1;9) and 16 children with DD (age: M=11;1, SD=1;1) as well as two groups of control children matched pairwise on age, gender and nonverbal intelligence were compared in their brain responses. The children heard semantically and syntactically correct sentences (e.g., Das Essen wurde gekocht. 'The meal was cooked.'), semantically incorrect sentences (e.g., Das Bild wurde gekocht. 'The picture was cooked.') and syntactically incorrect sentences with a joined prosodic incongruity (e.g., Das Ei wurde am gekocht. 'The egg was on-the cooked.'). Comparing correct sentences and syntactically incorrect sentences with a joined prosodic incongruity, children with SLI lacked a right anterior negativity while children with DD showed a very late right anterior negativity. The findings suggest that children with SLI or DD do not use prosodic information in the same way normally developing children do. Less well established prosodic processes may in turn have hampered the development of syntactic processes such as the early and highly automatic processes of phrase structure building as indicated by group differences in the early left anterior negativity. Children with SLI showed a very late left anterior negativity while the left anterior negativity in children with DD had an earlier onset but it was still delayed compared to the ERP response observed for the control children. With regard to late and more controlled syntactic processes, the P600 effects were similar in amplitude and distribution in both groups and also similar to the P600 responses observed in the control children. The intact P600 effects could indicate the presence of a compensatory strategy to successfully complete sentence comprehension. Contrasting ERP responses to correct sentences and semantically incorrect sentences, children with SLI lacked an N400 effect while they had N400 components with similar amplitudes in response to both types of sentences. These results suggest that children with SLI have a weaker lexical-semantic verb representation. By contrast, children with DD had a similar N400 effect to that observed for the control children. To summarize, children with SLI and children with DD have deficits in processing phonological information in particular prosodic information. The deficit in processing prosodic information may impact negatively on the development of early, automatic processes of phrase structure building, while later and more controlled processes of reanalyses and repair may serve as compensatory strategy. Lexical-semantic processes seem to be intact in children with DD. By contrast, children with SLI have a poor representation of the verb meaning.
Conference:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Language
Citation:
Sabisch
B,
Hahne
A,
Glass
E,
Von Suchodoletz
W and
Friederici
A
(2008). Specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia: The same or different?.
Conference Abstract:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.261
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Received:
09 Dec 2008;
Published Online:
09 Dec 2008.
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Correspondence:
Beate Sabisch, Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, sabisch@cbs.mpg.de